


Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Awesome Pepper Potts, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Drama, Gen, Iron Man 3, POV Pepper Potts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 16:48:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7941826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whither Pepper in Phase III?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

Pepper was sitting in a restaurant in Suzhou being introduced to the head of a major chip manufacturing corporation over an impressive display of delicacies, each identified for her and which she was exhorted to try and for which her chopsticks skills were thankfully up to par. Which she was in turn complimented for. Their host, another manufacturing magnate in a city and country full of them, spoke of Suzhou's pagodas and Tiger Hill and the other sites and wonders she has, in fact, seen over her half-dozen trips to the city. She agreed to their splendor and beauty in her heavily accented but actually fairly serviceable Mandarin, which in turn earned her more praise for making such efforts to learn such a difficult language.

There would be no official business conducted tonight, not in the Western sense. There would be no verbal commitments to future projects, no talk of numbers or factory space or exclusivity arrangements or anything so concrete. The business here tonight was nonetheless of paramount importance, which was why she'd flown halfway across the world for dinner. Stark Industries did so well in China because Pepper understood _guanxi_. And so she'd come to Suzhou not to discuss contracts but to discuss art. Specifically a pair of Eastern Wu Dynasty jars sitting on a pedestal in a living room in Atherton, California, in the home of the CIO of an IT unicorn. Her new acquaintance believed that they belonged in a museum in Suzhou, where they had been created so long ago, but had been unable to convince the Atherton unicorn to sell them. Pepper was here tonight as the friend of a friend who could make that happen. Indirectly, of course, as she'd never be asked and she would never offer such a service explicitly. But that she'd come at all proved that their host had enough sway with her; when she delivered the sculptures, she would prove her own power and reliability. And then, after a suitable period of time, there would be a multi-billion dollar deal signed and Stark Industries would benefit on many fronts.

The unicorn in Atherton was a 30-year-old dudebro from Santa Clara who wouldn't know the Three Kingdoms from the Three Musketeers and could be swayed with a couple of invites to one of Tony's racing parties and a fat check casually handed over by his dudebro hero, Tony Stark.

In fact, it did not even take a check, fat or otherwise. It took the keys to one of Tony's Bugattis, and not even one of the good ones. It was Tony's idea, in part because he still understood how the dudebro mind worked better than she did and mostly because he was "so done" with Bugatti after they'd done something to the fuel injector that he disapproved of. "I'll use the profits down the line to buy something I'll actually drive," he'd assured her afterward.

She never found out what that was.

A month after she flew the jars over to Suzhou, Tony flew himself into the Pacific at Mach .83 trying out a new suit. He was alive because Rhodey had been there -- which was a good thing for him and a bad thing for Rhodey after Pepper got a voicemail from Tony that began with "Hey, I'm talking to you so I'm obviously alive, but..." and ended with her boyfriend shipped back to her in pieces. She knew Rhodey's ideas for Tony-management didn't align with her own, but there was letting him burn some extra energy off in a healthy way and there was letting him try to break the sound barrier before he figured out why the yaw control was sticky.

There was a short period of calm after that, entirely because JARVIS had long experience with ignoring Tony's whims when he wasn't sober and Tony on prescription opiates sounded the same as Tony after too much vodka. (Tony on both at once sounded like Ethel Merman and Pepper had those videos saved for instant playback as needed.) Tony was chastened, if not quite discouraged from further human testing, and spent most of his recovery designing a portable solar generator when he thought Pepper was watching and a new repulsor system for the Iron Man boots when he thought she wasn't. It was the sort of compromise she could live with and she did. Even if she did once bring out the Ethel Merman clips when Tony actually tried to convince her that the solid light construct boot hovering in the living room was a hydroponic vase for bamboo.

In October, Stark Industries beat their quarterly forecast and they both got entirely too drunk the night after the stock prices jumped 4% in the first hour of trading and barely slowed by the time the closing bell rang. They woke up in the Seychelles with no idea how they'd gotten there and stayed for a week.

It wasn't all smooth sailing, of course. Tony stayed up all night working on the suits and Pepper stayed extra days in London or Tokyo or Nairobi and they got pissed at each other for not putting the effort into their relationship. They had fights, they had phone sex, they made promises to talk about what they needed from each other instead of getting resentful that the other person didn't have telepathy. They welshed on those promises and made them again.

And then came the Mandarin. And then came Extremis. And then came Pepper's leave of absence from the boardroom because she needed time and space to process what the hell had just happened to her, let alone her life and her company.

(The payout from Suzhou was here, not that she cared in the moment. The SIP factories went online as scheduled.)

Tony could stabilize the Extremis _so that she didn't set things on fire_ and he could talk to her in the dark of the night about what it had felt like to wake up in a cave in Afghanistan with a battery sewn into his sternum and the very intimate horror of being changed like this, _violated_ like this. His words mattered because they were the most truthful, most vulnerable words he'd ever spoken to her and he was laying himself bare to his soul all in the hopes of making her that little bit less scared. But he couldn't promise her that this was the end of it, that nobody would come for her because of what was still in her bloodstream, however inert. And he couldn't promise that Iron Man's day had passed, although he actually did use those words to promise just that. But she's heard his voice and she'd known the truth of it.

To his everlasting credit, Tony tried. He really, truly _tried_. He stopped working on Iron Man suits and started focusing on War Machine, first to Rhodey's pleasure and then to his annoyance. He used the Iron Man blueprints to build a prototype of a different sort of body armor, entirely defensive in nature, to be used to evacuate wounded off of battlefields and away from natural disasters. RESCUE, he called it, and painted it the colors of the sunrise. "It's the color of your hair, Pep," he'd corrected gently when she'd brought it up. "Sunrises are nice, too, but that wasn't what I was going for. The Pentagon will want it in drab camo colors, but here and now, I can go with this."

He wasn't going to give them proprietary control, of course. It would be a loan like War Machine's armor, to be maintained in-house so that it couldn't be reverse-engineered or used as a weapon. It would inspire hope instead of fear and it would only save lives.

"Happy anniversary," he told her after the final test and she stared at him because it wasn't their anniversary. He smiled sweetly, happy he'd surprised her. "Your first interview with me. Ten years ago today. I think it's supposed to be tin or something, but I think this is one of those cases where my iconoclasm works to your advantage instead of your migraine..."

The Pentagon never got to request RESCUE get repainted because they never saw her. The DoD demo day was still three weeks into the future when Project Insight was revealed in all of its terrible glory.

She came close to being murdered (again) that day, she later found out. She had been on the same list of targets Tony had been on not because HYDRA didn't know if Extremis was really gone or just temporarily turned off, but instead because they feared her _mind_. "Potts's capacity to command the loyalty and quantity of resources sufficient to destabilize the early phases of HYDRA's new order must be eliminated," read the succinct justification for her murder by helicarrier.

They had feared her business sense and her common sense and her connections and her very human strength, which would have been flattering under other circumstances, but she didn't have the time to revel. She needed all of that to keep Stark Industries afloat after the global collapse of the entire military industrial complex. Everyone was suspect. Everyone was afraid. And everyone was most afraid of the ones who'd contributed, however inadvertently, to what had nearly been the murder of twenty million people on the first day of a global coup. Which for the current purposes included Stark Industries, no matter how long ago they'd divested from the defense sector.

But while she was battling for Howard Stark's professional legacy, Tony was battling for his personal one. Tony had hated his father for killing his mother, for having one martini too many one too many times before getting behind the wheel on a snowy night. That Howard and Maria Stark had instead been assassinated by HYDRA, that Tony had been raging at an innocent man for more than twenty years when he could have been avenging their deaths, when he could have been fulfilling their hopes for him instead of confirming all of their worst fears... it destroyed him. And in the end, it destroyed them.

She couldn't be where and when and who he needed her to be because sometimes she had to put the many over the one, had to keep the company running because there were not only jobs on the line, there were _lives_ \-- Stark Industries made medical devices and water filtration systems and she could not toss that all aside every time he needed her. Or even most of the time. No matter how much pain he was in, no matter how much it hurt her to see him in pain. It was hard-hearted of her, maybe. It was why HYDRA had been afraid of her, probably. And when she looked back she could point to a dozen times she could have chosen Tony over everything else and everything else would have probably survived just fine. But in the moment, this was how she coped and those were the decisions she made and would have to live with and she felt bad that she didn't have more regrets about them because she'd always secretly thought of herself as someone who would always choose love. But love was simpler when there weren't thousands of people's lives and livelihoods at the other end of the scale.

Tony couldn't find his peace with her or within himself, so he went down to the workshop and he founded the Avengers as an independent group and he made himself too busy to notice his pain until he couldn't feel it anymore. It wasn't the healthiest of coping mechanisms, that she knew, but she also knew that it was less unhealthy for Tony than it looked. Being around the Avengers, being around _Steve Rogers_ , required a lot out of him and he thrived under high expectations. He got over Steve being "like the dead older brother I was always being compared to by the dad who liked him best" and started appreciating that Steve didn't want to be Howard's Steve any more than Tony wanted him to be. He had his playdates with Bruce, which were benign when all anyone thought they were doing was making animatronic betta fish. He trailed after Vision like a generation of young engineers trailed after him and didn't understand why Pepper thought it was so hilarious. He was building himself a _family_ and Pepper was grateful for it because he'd always needed one, needed the sorts of connections that she and Rhodey and Obediah had never been able to give him.

But that wasn't the only thing he was building.

In theory, in very theoretical theory, Ultron was a good idea. A good-hearted idea. She understood how Tony's mind worked in its caffeinated pinball way and she knew what he'd been going for and he'd only meant well. But that couldn't count in the end. Because in practice, his idea had birthed a Frankenstein's Monster that brought only terror and death and destruction at an incomprehensible scale. And in the center of the maelstrom, she saw the man people like Nick Fury had been afraid of, a genius who didn't know when to stop and couldn't be stopped by others and it scared her. And no matter how many times he tried to tell her that Vision was to Ultron what RESCUE had been to Iron Man, she knew he didn't understand why everyone was so worried. He didn't understand why his assurances that everything would be okay, that he was fixing things, was not the soothing balm he meant it to be. Ultron was gone, but his creator was still looking to improve on the concept.

They fought about that, really fought. For weeks that turned into months. They'd screamed at each other in earnest before, usually about the Iron Man armor and the Avengers and how much of Tony's attention and devotion all of that took from Tony being a person, let alone a person with responsibilities to people and things not related to superheroics. But when he started using those same arguments in defense of not burning everything to do with Ultron back down to sand and molecules, she realized she was never going to win. Not when Tony was explaining just how integral to his very self all of this was, being Iron Man, being an inventor, following his creative muse... It was bad enough on the face of it, but that he was just as obviously covering up for something he didn't want to tell her, that made it worse. Because she _knew_ Tony and she knew that whatever it was was scaring him.

Tony, when he was scared, doubled down. It had taken her years to understand that, to realize how much that simple reaction governed his life, how it was the fuel for almost all of his bad decisions and a few of his greatest ones. But the whole reason they worked together -- in any capacity, going back to her days as his PA and pooper-scooper -- was that he let her call him on his bullshit. He'd never expected her to be fooled by the show he put on for the rest of the world and he'd let her pull him back from the edge when he'd gone too far over. He'd trusted her with his image, which for years had seemed more important to him than his life, until he'd learned better and then trusted her with both.

Which was why the lies now, obvious lies to anyone who had ever heard Tony Stark do his full routine more than once, they _hurt_. After more than a decade of respecting her ability to see behind the razzle-dazzle, he was feeding her bullshit like she could be distracted by it.

"I can't do this anymore."

She'd whispered the words against the wall of Tony's rising voice, but he'd heard her.

"What?"

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, realizing the truth of it and accepting it as right. "I can't do this anymore, Tony."

He didn't ask for clarification. She didn't have to explain how exhausting it was trying to roll with his tide, how much it hurt to have the greatest part of her heart throwing himself down roads he shouldn't travel and she couldn't sway him from, how the responsibility she felt for him was crushing her. How her love for him, as deep and profound and encompassing as it was, wasn't enough against the hurt she felt here and now that he was pushing her away in a fashion that was obvious to them both. She knew he could see it.

They parted like ships in the night, quietly and without incident or warning or word to anyone save Rhodey. She focused her attentions on rescuing Stark Industries -- once again -- because, unsurprisingly, its Chairman of the Board building a murderbot that decimated a country did not do wonders for its bottom line. She went to galas and museum exhibit openings, she went halfway around the world to build the groundwork for favors down the line, she attended conferences and appeared on the covers of magazines and because she'd always had had a policy about not talking about Tony in a personal capacity when she was in her professional one, the charade went on. She'd kept the Avengers as Tony's business and not hers, so there were no questions from that sector. She would have bet money on Tony not having said anything if there'd been anyone to bet.

The MIT invite was an accident, Tony explained in a text -- the only way either of them could communicate without tears. She could disregard it; he could handle the scholarship news on his own. He could, and with more and better drama than she should and she texted that to him. "They're my people," he texted back in agreement and she knew he was already regretting the phrase because he was worried that she'd be reminded that she wasn't, not anymore.

"Nerds of a feather flock together," she typed back before he could start digging that hole.

"Still saving my bacon," he wrote back because he'd never been half as oblivious as he'd pretended to be.

She sent back a bacon emoji. She got back a pig. "With interest."

The first time Tony called her, it was to tell her that the UN was about to take over the Avengers and he was inclined to let them. She didn't understand the decision at all, even after Lagos -- he'd spurned their offer in appallingly rude fashion after he'd announced their formation -- but she'd lost the right to question it. He knew that there would be fallout for the company, not necessarily bad ("for once") but because of the conflict of interest. He might need a blind trust for his shares in SI or something else of the same sort. He'd test the waters at the Accords signing, see how many delegates accused him of profiteering.

"It's going to go badly," he confessed to her with a sigh. "Not the Accords, the Accords will go fine because Romanoff could pants the Pope at Easter Mass and she'll minimize the danger. But what happens after. Rogers isn't going along with it and The History Channel is full of examples of what happens when people tell him things he doesn't want to hear."

There was a certain tone of bemusement under the frustration and she wondered if it was Tony realizing he could have been talking about himself or simply the fondness he'd developed for a friend.

"He's going through a rough spot right now," she offered in return, as both reminder and hope for the future. "Peggy Carter's death can't be easy for him."

She'd never really become friends with Steve Rogers -- away from the spotlight, he had a certain reserve to him and they'd stalled comfortably at "good acquaintances." But she'd written out a condolence card for him this morning and had already started the paperwork to create the Margaret Carter Scholarship for young women studying international affairs because Howard and Maria Stark had thought the world of her, judging by the quantity of her appearances in photos Tony pretended he never looked at.

"He's going through a rough time right now," Tony agreed with resignation. "Which might buy us some time. But then he's going to do something and Wilson is going to do it with him and all hell will break loose. Because if anything is going to bring Bucky Barnes out of hiding, it's Steve Rogers in a pickle."

It didn't go like that, of course. Tony was right about the arc and wrong about the details and his usual habit was to brush away the latter as unimportant, but this time he couldn't. The damage was too great and the wounds too deep.

"I did this," Tony said as she sat with him at Rhodey's hospital bedside, the only noise the beeping of the machines and the gentle whoosh of the HVAC. "I did all of this."

She'd flown all night to get here -- after a middle-of-the-night phone call that had just been Tony crying -- and she was exhausted and drained and heartbroken to see such a vital man as Rhodey with such a dismal prognosis.

"I'm sure you did some of it," she said softly. "But not as much as you think."

Her eyes were closed to fight the burning dryness, but she could hear Tony chuckle darkly.

"No, this time I'm not taking credit for everyone else's work," he said sourly. "I did this. I set us all on this path. You, Rhodey, the Avengers... I set up all the dominoes even if someone else made them fall."

And then he told her what he should have told her years ago, about the Scarlet Witch's nightmare and his own attempt at making sure it never came to pass. And how, instead, he'd come so close to making sure it happened exactly as he'd feared.

"You've made me watch Macbeth," he said wryly. "I should have known better."

She was too overcome to do more than shake her head and smile. It was ripping up old scabs, it was the too-late answer to a question that might have saved them, it was this intimacy of confession that made her remember what they'd once had. And what she still missed, if not quite with the ferociousness she once had.

"I lost control of everything. I lost control of _myself_ ," he went on with a shudder. " _I_ was the nightmare. This started off with me being told I would become a murderer. It got bigger when I was told I actually was a murderer. And then I went and nearly made it all come true. Maybe it's good that everything's come crashing down. I don't know that I'd trust me with more than a bag of Cheetos right now."

She knuckled the start of one tear from her eye and gestured toward the bed with her chin. "He's going to trust you to help him," she said. "And you'd better come through because if there is anyone who is holding enough of your outstanding debt to bankrupt you, it's Jim Rhodes."

Tony smiled at her. "He's one of two, I think."

"You pay me very well to clean up your messes," she reminded him. "You always have."

Which was a deflection and she knew it and he knew it, too.

He reached out for her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it and then keeping it in a gentle clasp. "You're good people, Virginia Potts."

"I am," she agreed.

She fell asleep at some point, her hand still in his.


End file.
